System performance is one of the most important criteria used in determining business success. With ever increasing reliance on software applications, such as IT applications, businesses cannot afford downtime or poor performance.
Many technologies and tools have been developed to monitor system performance. These technologies and tools provide users, such as system administrators, with large amounts of performance data across the entire technology stack, from the underlying Infrastructure resource metrics up through to application level runtime parameters. The burden is then on the user, such as the system administrator, to sift through this often voluminous performance data to pick out tell-tale symptoms of potential performance bottlenecks and accordingly decide on an appropriate course of action. For example, if a system administrator is monitoring disk utilization of a server, one of the decisions that the system administrator would need to make is regarding the health of the disk and when to provision for an upgrade. Although such monitoring and prompt decision making by a user are crucial from a performance perspective, they can be extremely time consuming. In addition, the quality of the result depends on the experience of the user reviewing the performance data and making decisions regarding future capacity needs.
Therefore, there exists ample opportunity for improvement in technologies related to performance monitoring and capacity management.